Post

At the risk of starting the flame war to end all flame wars... Modern LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude 4.5, Gemini 3) produce excellent code and can be a significant productivity boost to software engineers who take the time to learn how to effectively apply them - especially if used with coding agent tools

it's also true I wouldn't accept code from someone who couldn't write that code without an AI assistant and who doesn't know how it works, especially if it's a hit-and-run PR that they won't have to maintain

Same here - my hard rule is that if you can't explain how the code works that code shouldn't end up in a commit to anything other than a toy project

Ok I mean it's pretty easy to say this, but rarely can someone actually explain every layer of dependencies underneath the code they CAN explain. Comprehension is always shared across people for complex work.

What level of comprehension/and fixing we want to expect from people, in order for them to do certain kinds of work, is such an interesting and important question! And has been a bit ignored in software so far in a way that isn't helping us now, imho.

I suspect that we really do need to emphasize a much more social learning/collaborative knowledge approach to this versus individual understanding, that's the piece that software culture doesn't like to admit though!

Especially "computer science" is built on leveraging abstractions at every layer. It's not really useful to "know" everything. Though, when you look at some frontend projects with 1500+ NPM packages, you got to wonder how much one *should* know about those dependencies.

For better (or probably) worse, I think it’s the code you put your name against. I.e. you can use any tool you like, but you need to sign your name to the output. I’d expect someone to understand what dependencies they used and how they used them, as well as the first-party code they write.